Optical Illusions

Native Canadian Ambiguous Art

Depending how you see it, this panel either shows two killer whales looking at one another in profile, or a bear looking at you head on – the killer whales’ fins top centre become the bears’ ears. And then the killer whales’ tails centre bottom become the mouth of a third creature, probably a frog, [...]

Cheating with tessellations

Tessellations are patterns whose repeat motifs fit together like jig-saw pieces, with no gaps and no repeats. For an introduction, see our earlier animation. They can be abstract patterns, but the most intriguing are the ones devised by tessellation maestro M.C.Escher in the middle of the last century, which show representational motifs, such as animals, [...]

Hybrid Portraits

Hybrid portraits superimpose one portrait on top of another, so that one appears with close viewing, and the other emerges with more distant viewing. Or with reduced image size. Or just by taking off your specs, if you are just a little way away and are seriously short-sighted. Whatever works for you, here Charlie Chaplin becomes [...]

Bubble Beach Penguin

Here’s another picture to add to our category of soap bubble imagery. For details about how I photograph the bubbles, see entries in the soap bubble category. I hadn’t noticed before that there are some great movies of bubbles on Youtube, such as this model of Jupiter’s turbulence, or this movie of a bubble bursting. [...]

Magic Ring

Here’s a movie of a brilliant, double spiral novelty illusion ring. It’s available to buy from Grand Illusions, and on that link you can also see another movie of the illusory effect. As the ring is rotated, it seems to expand when rotated one way, and contract when rotated the other [...]

Decor with Attitude

This is an installation called Zig-Zag Corridor by Czech artist Petr Kvicala, in the Dox art centre in Prague, Czech Republic. He’s an artist who produces dazzling patterned effects. In this one, beautiful diagonals meander through the patterns, although the linework is entirely made up of a continuous sequence of horizontal and vertical segments. However, [...]

Hidden Message

Can you read the message encoded in the image? A few months back I posted about embedding hidden messages in images. Since then I’ve come across a much better way of doing it, using the lettering in the image above. Lettering? What lettering? You may not even have been able to spot the lettering [...]

Judith with the Head of Holofernes – or is it the other way round?

Who owns the body? Judith does to start with, but then Holofernes does, and finally, it’s ambiguous. Here’s a new addition to our series of ambiguous improved artworks. Apologies this time are due to Rubens. I got the idea for these illusions from a print by Picasso. For a downloadable [...]

The Thiery-Wundt and Muller-Lyer illusions

Top left is one of the simplest of all illusions. The yellow dot is just half way up the vertical height of the triangle, but looks decidedly nearer to the apex. The effect was reported over a century ago, and has been named for its original researchers the “Thiery-Wundt illusion” by recent experimenters Ross Day [...]

Hiroyuki Ito’s new depth illusion

Do you see an effect of depth as if looking into a tunnel in the right hand spinning pattern? It’s a new depth illusion published by Hiroyuki Ito last year. It’s not all that strong in my example, but it’s certainly there to my eye, and it gets stronger [...]